When EA announced the introduction of EA Access, it seemed like an unusually generous move for the video games publisher/developer. For $4.99 a month of $29.99 a year you get full access to a growing library of games for as long as you keep subscribing. And once a game has been added to the EA Access library, it’s there permanently.

But it’s not all good news as has been discovered today.

For the past decade EA has been releasing a demo of new Madden NFL games for gamers to play before deciding to purchase. But for Madden NFL 15there is no free demo. If you want early access to the game then EA expects you to pay for the EA Access subscription.

Just like EA Access itself, this is surely an experiment for EA. If locking early access to a game behind a pay wall means subscription numbers increase, then don’t expect any more free demos from EA in the future. Every one of them will be exclusive to EA Access, and we will probably see games series that never had demos before start getting them.

You can view this positively, though. $4.99 or $29.99 a year is a small price to pay to find out you don’t like certain new games and in the process save yourself $60. But for that to truly work EA would need to offer all its games through early access going forward. If EA thinks a game won’t sell huge numbers, I doubt EA Access subscribers will get to sample it early.